“How do I know? Why, amn’t I sitting across the table from her even now?”
“He drove over there late last night,” I told Elaine, “but felt it was too late to show up on her doorstep, so he parked across the street and kept his eyes open. Then this morning, as soon as it seemed to him to be a decent hour, he rang her doorbell. He found it remarkable that she remembered him.”
“Has anyone ever forgotten Mick?”
“I asked him that. He said there’ve been some that wished they could.”
“I’ll bet.”
“The house has a burglar alarm and a good set of locks, and she’s got Mick in there with her. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to worry about her before, but now I don’t have to. He killed her parents, you know.”
“I know.”
“She’s still living there. All by herself, in that big house.”
“And now she’s got Mick for company.”
All the Flowers Are Dying
249
“They’re playing cribbage,” I said. “They played cribbage four years ago, when he went and guarded her.”
I picked up the phone and called Ira Wentworth and told him most of it, although I don’t think I mentioned that they were playing cribbage. “I don’t know how we forgot about her,” I said, “but she’ll be all right now. He’s not going to get in there, and God help him if he does.
Still, it might not be a bad idea to stake the place out.”
“Because he might show up,” he said. “I talked to my captain, and we’re reopening the Lia Parkman file. I can probably spring a couple of plainclothes to sit in a car and watch the block.” I put the phone down, and the next time it rang it was Sussman. The lab evidence was preliminary, and you couldn’t take it to the bank, but every indication was that the teenage male in Queens and the woman in Manhattan had been killed in the same manner—a single thrust from the rear, between two ribs and into the heart. The weapons used in the two homicides were at the very least similar, and probably iden-tical.
“And for now,” he said, “that’s as far as it’s gonna go. I don’t even want to write it up, let alone go and tell somebody. Because God help us all if the media get hold of this. You want to try imagining the subway at rush hour with every passenger trying to watch his back?”
“They’d want metal detectors,” I said.
“At every turnstile. Take the coins out of your pockets, put ’em in the tray, and swipe your Metrocard. Yeah, right. We got to catch this prick in a hurry, that’s all. Because you can only keep a lid on it for so long. If he does it one more time, takes out one more rush-hour straphanger, some media genius is gonna figure it out all by himself.
And there goes the front page in every paper and the lead slot on every TV newscast, and we’ve got panic in the streets. And under them.” That evening I was sitting in a chair with a book, and Elaine came over looking concerned and asked me if I was all right. Evidently I’d set the book down and had been staring off into space for five or ten minutes.
I hadn’t been aware of it.
I said, “I hate not doing anything. I hate waiting for something to 250
Lawrence Block
happen and hoping I can react to it properly when it does. I hate feeling helpless and useless and out of the loop.”
“And old?”
“And old,” I said. “I know there’s nothing I can do other than what I’m doing already. I know all that, and I’ll keep on doing it. But I don’t like the way it feels.”
It felt a little better in the morning. Sussman called, and I could hear the change in his voice. “We found him,” he said, and before I could react he corrected himself. “Found where he’s living, I should say. Way the hell west on Fifty-third Street. A woman recognized the sketch, said he was the nice young man come to take care of his Uncle Joe, who had to go to the Veterans Hospital up in the Bronx. Except the people at the VA never heard of Joe Bohan, and my guess is nobody’s ever gonna see poor old Joe again.”
“I don’t suppose our guy was on the premises.”
“No,” he said, “but his laptop was. The laptop’s password-protected, but we’ve got a guy we can go to who can crack it quicker than a high school kid can break into a locked car. We don’t have to get into it to know it’s our guy’s laptop, though, because Joe wasn’t an online kind of guy. In fact you wouldn’t know Joe ever lived there, because all of his things are gone. All that’s left would seem to belong to the owner of the laptop, and one of the articles in question is a big old knife. Even as we speak, they’re trying to match it up to the subway stabbings. And I’ve got a dozen men on the block, keeping an eye out, waiting for him to come back for his laptop. Or his knife.”
33
Sometimes it seems to him that there truly are guardian angels, and that he has one. At more rational moments the notion of a guardian angel strikes him as essentially metaphorical, a convenient way to personify that portion of one’s mind-spirit-self capable of perceiving the imperceptible.
Years ago, during his last stay in New York, he was away from his apartment on Central Park West when Scudder led a band of cops there.
He was in a taxi, on his way home, ready to walk right into a lobby swarming with police officers just waiting for him to appear, and something warned him, something made him get out of the cab and approach the rest of the way on foot, cautiously, alert for any sign of danger.
Looking back, he has never been able to pinpoint anything that should have made him wary. He can recall no police sirens wailing in the distance, no discernible change in the appearance of the neighborhood as the cab neared its destination. But whatever you choose to call it, a guardian angel, a higher self, an elevated level of ESP, it is
